UDL: Satan At The Cinema "The Movie 2012 Revisited"

Like novels, films can be extremely dangerous documents about a time, but very good artifacts of a time. In this course, we will use films as reflections of the time in which they were made (i.e., as "artifacts"), and not as truthful depictions of actual historical events (i.e., as "documentation"). [FS Note: This makes film by definition myths and parables] This is an important distinction. This will be especially evident when we view D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

Film is much more convincing than the printed page and much more interesting than most history professor's lectures. It seems real and "True." Because of film's power to convince, many historians see film as a more dangerous history teacher than themselves, and prone to abuse its power.